Most experienced inside sales leaders already know a lot about leadership.
You know one-to-one conversations should happen consistently. Coaching needs to be specific to the salesperson. Expectations need to be clear. You need to inspect what you expect.
You know pipeline conversations need to go deeper than, “So, where are we with this one?”
Yet knowing something and consistently doing it can end up surprisingly far apart.
That space is your leadership gap.
A customer issue blows up. Your boss needs numbers. Someone calls out sick. A salesperson needs help with a deal. Your calendar fills up.
- The one-to-one gets moved.
- The coaching conversation becomes a quick answer.
- You give someone a clear expectation, then forget to come back and ask what happened.
- The pipeline review happens, but you don’t have time to dig into the opportunities that don’t quite make sense.
None of this happens because you suddenly forgot how to lead. It’s that leadership has to compete with everything else in your day.
Find Your Leadership Gap
Think about something you know is important to your team’s success that you aren’t doing consistently.
Where does the gap show up?
This is where the maybes come in:
Maybe you know you need to spend more time coaching, but coaching keeps getting squeezed out.
One salesperson needs more frequent check-ins, but you’re still managing everyone with the same rhythm.
The pipeline conversations need to go deeper, but you’re accepting updates instead of asking questions that help you understand what’s really happening.
You make sure expectations are clear when you give them, but you aren’t consistently coming back to inspect what happened afterward.
You probably already know what you should be doing differently.
The question is whether you’ve built a way to make sure you actually do it.
Close the Gap With Leadership Cadence
This is one of the reasons I keep coming back to leadership cadence.
Important leadership activities need a place in your schedule. Your cadence takes the leadership practices you already know matter and builds them into how you operate.
That matters because a quiet week probably isn’t coming.
There will always be another customer issue, report, meeting, deal, interruption, or salesperson who needs something.
Your leadership cadence helps you keep leading while all of that is happening.
Put It Into Practice
Pick one thing you already know you should be doing more consistently as a leader.
Look at the last few weeks instead of what you intended to do.
- How often did it actually happen?
- Where did execution break down?
- What needs to be scheduled, tracked, followed up on, or built into your leadership cadence?
Then close one gap.
Do what you already know matters, consistently.
Still doing the work along with you,
Lynn
P.S. Know an inside sales leader who might recognize their own leadership gap? Feel free to forward this newsletter.